At first it was only a whisper, then I could hear it louder and louder until it was so loud that I couldn't ignore it. It was a rather high pitched voice or maybe the sounds of many small high pitched voices. I listened at the stairway, nothing, then at the basement door; no, the sound isn't coming from inside. I went to the outside door and as soon as I opened it I knew what it was. It was the sound of millions upon millions of freshly fallen snowflakes. They were all crying in unison saying they wanted someone to play outside, someone needed to wrinkle up the smooth blanket they had formed over all the earth. To bust through the monotony of their world and make tracks and piles and holes in the white canopy they had been building all day long.
As soon as I was outside, I could hear other voices, these were farther away and more mechanical. They were not the voices of nature, small and high pitched, these were deeper, more solid, voices. They were calling for help, they were cold voices, they were voices that said they wanted to be warmed, and they wanted to move and free themselves of the stillness that made them cold. Daniel and I got in the car, I had a good hunch where the second voices were coming from, and sure enough, as we pulled into Mom's old driveway the sound was unmistakably coming from the barn.
We found them in the barn, shivering, with skis and tracks frozen to the cold concrete floor. We broke them free and dragged them outside into the deep snow. "Please" they asked, "just a little gasoline?". And then, ever so timidly they begged for us to pull their starter cords. When we did, their engines roared to life and all modesty left them. They belched out foul smoke and screamed for us to pull hard on the throttles. When we did, they chewed into the fresh white snow and threw it far behind them as their skis plowed ahead cutting deep gouges into the path that their headlights blazed in the dark night of woods and fields. "Faster! Faster!" they screamed when we raced down the empty dark road with only the light of their headlights and the white billowing snow following behind. Finally after crisscrossing paths through fields and woods we ran them back into the barn, the noisy engines died as we hit the kill switches. They were hot and dripping wet, I could hear them huffing and puffing as we closed the overhead door and a whispered "thank you" from a tired and once again timid voice came from inside the barn as we walked away.
The snow was quiet now as it surveyed the damage done to it's beautiful coat. No longer smooth and soft, it had been chopped and cut and diced by skis and tracks going every which direction. But it was not complaining, it had asked for someone to play in it, and besides, it knows tomorrow's forecast calls for 3-4 more inches. By then the small voices will call again for someone to break the monotony of the white smooth blanket.
